skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple has been criticized about this for ages, and I think the criticism is generally a bit more nuanced than you let on: the complaint is that "modern" (post-OSX) Apple often goes way beyond simply showing good judgment and breaking the rules when it helps the interface, and many times strays into simple self-indulgence, making things prettier and shinier at the cost of usability.

[I don't use Apple products enough to say whether this is really true, and as an outside observer, I rather like the pretty-shiny. But that is the criticism.]
The WHAT I HAVE LEARNED Blog
I heard a kid complaining about Java being slow yesterday. People remember their first experiences for a long, long time after they stop being true.
Which search engine does it better?
Exactly what comes to my mind. "[…] easy-to-use themes that let you personalize the look of your Firefox."[1]

[1] http://www.getpersonas.com
Right, it made sense back then, but doesn't make sense now, so it supports the previous poster's point that historical leftovers shouldn't be celebrated for no reason. (But on the other hand, some, like hjkl, are still valuable.)
The 6Th Circuit: Home to the Hatfields and the McCoys, and probably more than a few bootleggers. =] I can see why it would spring to mind. All this IP talk must have put it on the mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield%E2%80%93McCoy_feud
The early adopter customer database for Startups in India
I meant I don't care for Python in mobile, and I think the people being pragmatic and making money on mobile feel the same.

Regarding bindings... would it make difference for Python? It's not like you're going to run NumPy on your iPhone.

The biggest selling point I see in bindings is the code reuse between platforms. Many cross-platform mobile apps are just web front ends, though.
Design is mostly about synthesizing many different goals and priorities into a coherent approach. It's pretty easy to take one goal or activity and design a flow for it, but making it work with all the other objectives of a project will take a lot of compromise. To make a simple and usable UI, you will need to design chunks that work well enough for a half-dozen different activities.

It's similar to architectural design.

It would be relatively easy for somebody who is not an architect to design a room built for one purpose only, say reading. It would have rows upon rows of ergonomic chairs with cupholders and book or ereader holders. This room would hold many people who could all read at once. It would be useless for anything else. Also, people tend to become uncomfortable in such a mechanistic and single-minded environment.

Most would rather read in a coffee shop, or a living room, rooms designed with compromises and artistic sense to support many, many different types of activities. I'm not going to get into specifics, but cubicle farms have the same problem.

The second most important part is painstaking logic. Once you have an overarching concept that unifies all the goals of your UI, you need to step through all of the most important activities (or "flows"), trying to determine whether it is the easiest possible way to complete the action, and if you can make it easier without breaking the overarching design. Sometimes you can't and that's OK. But if you can make it easier, you should.

Then there's visual design- This is tough because it is a completely separate discipline from UX, yet it is intimately bound to it. The main thing to remember is visual weight. It's bad if everything has the same weight. A good rule of thumb is the 1-2-3 presentation. There should be some elements that are primary, some that are secondary, some that are tertiary. It goes without saying that these weights correspond to the importance of certain actions in the interface. Play mind tricks on your user to steer them towards desirable behaviors.

If you can take something out without too many negative consequences, do it, because that will give you room later to make a completely different flow easier. Or leave that room empty to make your interface more simple and beautiful.

As for "scientific theories of design": Most of these things deal with visual weight and local presentation and have been common sense to artists for millenia, and are about as useful as A/B testing. That is, they are very useful towards the end to make sure that all of the separate elements in your design have reached local maxima. Maybe it's a bit like photography- if the photographer can give you scientific reasons for his white balance and exposure etc., good for him, but they say nothing about the subject matter or even the composition of the shot.

The ultimate criteria is the response of the audience, and no amount of tests or theories will ever touch that.
* A cache miss from L2 to RAM is extremely slow*

Yes, but a properly-sized hash table will result in an average of 1 to 2 cache misses per lookup regardless of how many elements. This is far better than what you get with other structures, except perhaps in specialized cases that happen to follow tree traversal.

and can be about a million times slower if you have to page fault all the way into swap.

Disk based data requires specialized algorithms.

accessing every element once in a large naive hash table will give you O(n) page faults on average whereas accessing every element sequentially in a vector will give you O(n/d) page faults where d is your page size. While asymptotically similar, in real life that constant d can be gigantic.

Sure, a vector is better when you only ever access elements in a single sequential order and don't add or remove elements anywhere except the end.

That being said, I'm not sure how the C++ unordered_map handles this

C++ defines a method of iterating over all the elements of an unordered_map. I think a typical implementation will just treat the hash memory as a vector and return values from the occupied buckets.
App.net lowers entry price and adds monthly option as membership grows
Some of the complaints in this post are valid, but most have nothing to do with the language itself. It's just a lack of understanding tools and technologies the JavaScript ecosystem offers. I'm a contributor to YUI, so I of course have a bias, but you could replace the examples below with things that are available for other libraries.

> Ever try to use different JavaScript tools with conflicting jQuery versions? Yeah, that sucks.

That's what is great about YUI, where you have most tools you need to build whatever you like (50+ components), and they're all tested and guaranteed to work together every release.
http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/guides/

> How about trying to figure out how to make 20 javascript include files load quicker as one request? Yeah that sucks too.

No it doesn't. YUI's modular system is completely centered around the concept of CDN combo-loading. It's dead-simple.

> Performance? Let me just point to the old Facebook mobile app made with JS & HTML5. It sucked. Enough said.

"HTML5" isn't a magic bullet that automatically makes everything awesome. You still have to design apps correctly. The author didn't elaborate on any specifics of why it "sucked", so I don't have much to go on to counter. JS would seem to perform quite well for anything FB needs to do in a Web app (display text, pictures, links), so any issues were likely just bad design.

> How about unit testing JavaScript? I've never tried it, but it sure sounds like fun.

It's actually pretty simple (and dare I say fun?). I've written hundreds of test cases. There are plenty of JS testing frameworks out there, including Y.Test (written by Nicholas Zakas, http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/test/) which can be used for YUI and non-YUI applications.

YUI itself has 6,300+ unit tests covering everything from core modules to website examples, and every single one of them pass 24/7 (or is fixed immediately).

> My biggest problem with JavaScript is code security. If I make some awesome product, there is no way to protect my code. How can we expect game makers to write apps in 100% JavaScript and HTML5 if they can't protect their intellectual property?

Is this arguing security, or IP protection? There's a reason why every proprietary plugin/runtime for the Web ultimately falls to the open competitor. A 50-line JS widget can easily be "stolen", but how much was it worth to begin with? View-source (IMO) is one of the best features of the Web, because it enables the Web to progress and evolve at a pace otherwise impossible. "Awesome products" have been made by Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, countless startups, and I don't think source-code visibility has harmed them in any significant way.

In conclusion, if I read this post 10 years ago, the author would have a solid case. But tens of thousands of developers have helped create an incredibly supportive ecosystem that provide just about every tool you need, just open your mind a little bit. JavaScript absolutely does not suck.
Irish Times learns from its start-up incubator winner, finalists
It's a real pain to guarantee that you will always get an answer back about whether some asynchronous operation succeeded or failed. Every callback needs to manually trap its own exceptions, manually listen for exception reports from the subsequent callbacks that it dispatches, and report it all back to the original caller.

There are libraries that make this better (example: https://github.com/kriskowal/q). But since they're not built into the language itself, you end up with more verbose code that's harder to debug when it breaks, and you can't easily interoperate with other code that uses a different flow control library.

There are lots of ways to design a language so that it doesn't suffer this problem. If you simply built an API like Q's into the spec for Javascript so that it had nice syntax and everyone could interoperate using it, that would be a minimum viable solution that retains all Javascript's existing performance characteristics. Alternatively, you can have real coroutines which I think would be even better, though that does change the memory-usage patterns more significantly.
I think we've had this conversation before :-)
Ceiling Log Base Two Function
There are two articles that are linked to in the text, one that describes comparisons of binary tress, self-adjusting tress, and hash tables. There's a second article that compares B-trees, hash tables, and a few other structures -- that's this one: http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~jz/fulltext/acmtois02.pdf
Cool little library!

To make it extra friendly to Django developers, you might want to do just a couple extra little housekeeping things:

* Structure as a Django app. Place jsmetatemplate.py in templatetags/jsmetatemplate.py

* Make the license clear with a `LICENSE' file.

* Add test(s).

* At some point, include distutils things (setup.py) and upload to PyPI for straightforward installation with easy_install/pip.
but every language has annoying quirks.

IMO Javascript's quirks are unusually bad because failing to avoid them frequently results in code that appears to work just fine (and will probably pass all its tests), only to blow up at some random point in the future. Missing var, == instead of ===, for-in without hasOwnProperty...
It's geek cred to have a low Slashdot user ID too bad I can't remember mine :(
I'd yield to someone who understands the code, but a quick glance at dictGetRandomKey() shows it is randomized, and I believe is very close to 1/N. If there are a large number of elements in a single bucket this may not be true. At an extreme, if there is one element in a bucket and N-1 in another, there is a 50% chance teh first will get picked, and 50/(N-1)% the others will.
They push an update to iOS 5? Which has OTA self-updates.

Lion and Snow Leopard and Vista and countless other old OSes get updates. XP still won't get EOS-ed for another 2 years.
Study shows looking at photos of Kittens and Puppies can Improve Concentration
I suspect there are localized versions of these already out there.

As a Canadian, we have ePost.ca which is run by the government. Basically a digital mailbox for paying bills.
Measuring content marketing with our new 'Post Impact' metric
I just got back from a trip to hawaii, and still bought the Kindle version of the LP guide (and another) while there, rather than a physical print book, because I could do it from my hotel room without putting on pants the day before picking the next day's activity. A secondary consideration was 3 less things to carry around.

The books really could have been vastly better -- there were some clickable urls (when viewed in the iPad 3 kindle app)
I ran experiments back in the day that varied the size of the hash table, and tried extremes where there were extremely long chains (high collisions). Take a look at pages 274 and 275, you'll be perhaps surprised how fast hash tables are when there are collisions -- especially if you use the move-to-front heuristic. (I agree with the other comments that the article is primarily concerned with the read use case.) http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~whalen/Hash/Hash_Articles/In-me...
It depends on the application of the hash table, but malicious agents could 'attack' code by purposefully creating collisions if the author isn't careful. An algorithm expected to run in O(1) that runs at O(n) could be catastrophic.
Tech entrepreneur gives up investment banking scholarship to run a startup
I've posted that link once or twice before (once or twice literally, not sarcastically), it wouldn't surprise me if I was replying to you in one of those instances :)

Here, I found it, we both posted in this thread, but not to each other: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3560158
Venture capitalist Global Brain Japan to set up office in Singapore
Beyond Scared Straight Computer Hacker [video]
Thanks for the book and other goodies, Nathan. I've watched all of the videos included in the package and will be actually reading the book soon. I initially skimmed because I wanted to checkout everything else that was included. I'm liking everything so far. Well worth it!
Ask HN: what is your recommended 3 monitor setup
I am a developer on MS W7 platform and looking to get a 3 monitor setup. I am confused by the number of options - should I just get a multi-monitor hub or get one with multiple video cards? TIA
ShowHN: Scraped 800 .vimrc files from github, analyzed for fun
A search engine is judged by its utility, which is why having 10,000 geeks use it is a good sign.

A social network is not judged by the same sort of criteria, and so it's not at all clear to me why someone would apply the same strategy.
Last week I learned about another crazy "feature": Function hoisting

http://elegantcode.com/2011/03/24/basic-javascript-part-12-f...
Did this for fun mostly to test out casper.js (it's nice!)

I'd welcome any feedback on how to better present interesting data, or answer any questions. Thanks!
I have no idea why I haven't installed xsel already. The help mentions a secondary clipboard. X has a secondary clipboard? Is there a way to paste that (like middle click for the primary)?
Analytics for a site I run (mainly dealing with web-dev) has Chrome usage growing at a steady rate. For the past 6 months, Chrome has gained about 1% market share a month (out of ~160,000 visits a month).
>But as supply eventually declines the price may rise enough that petroleum can no longer feasibly be used [...] //

It can still feasibly be used by those who own the oil stock itself. It's not the inherent cost that is increasing only the market price. As the price rises the market should work to ensure that every last drop of oil is bled from the Earth. If the price goes to high then [in a perfect market] it will drop back to ensure maximum exploitation.

It's only a falling price below the production cost that makes it infeasible to extract surely?
Show HN: WebcamSwiper - a JS library that watches for hand swipes in the air
Change of guards - MSFT to GOOG
It couldn't handle files with spaces, plus the link it gives initiates a download for the file instead allowing you to view it in the browser. Considering most of the time I want to quickly upload a file in this manner the file is a screenshot, this is basically useless for me.
Google Services with Nexus Program
The Whole Brain Billiards Biohacking Project
Show HN: Resumetopia - 8 Hour weekend project
Very smart, to drive even more sales of both books with a podcast "series" starring both authors. Which one of you came up with that genius idea?
Will you cover the podcast in the podcast?
>the efficient price of oil is surely higher than what the price of oil is now //

Does this assume that the only way to move people on from oil dependency is financial. That's largely true I guess.

If not this then what other assumptions/ projections/predictions lead to this conclusion.

Does making scarce things too expensive to buy always constitute "adding value"?
Hash Tables make iteration order hard to predict.

Hash functions rarely are meaningful outside of the context of the collection.

The tree interface leads to a simpler world.
Plivo (YC S12) is hiring for Marketing Role in San Francisco, CA
At Plivo (www.plivo.com), our goal is to build the best Telecom API platform on the market that both businesses and developers love. We are a young startup growing fast in both usage of our platform and in revenue. Having just completed YC, we’re excited to grow our business and expand our team. That’s where you come in.

The Role

-----------

Build marketing function from the ground up including:

* Handle PR, SEO, SEM, Community Management & Social Media
* Attend conferences & speaking engagements
* Articulate companies positioning
* Discover new means of distribution

The Requirements

----------------------

* Be self-driven and get things done on tight deadlines
* At least 1 year of hands on marketing experience
* Extrovert in person and online. Already engaging on Twitter, FB, Quora, etc.
* Be able to think outside the box and innovate strategies to promote Plivo
* Communicate effectively through speech and writing

#While it’s not necessary, the ability to write a sample app using our APIs is a huge plus! We’re talking brownie points people.

The Next Steps

-----------------

Send your resume, app (optional), and a brief description as to why you think you can take Plivo to the next level to mopt@plivo.com.
I am setting out on a 6 month journey to tap into both hemispheres of my brain in attempt to raise my IQ, increase my health and improve my billiards skills. It all starts in 9 days and I'll be sharing it with the world.
>Delta still has to buy crude to feed their refinery. //

Or drill for it.
I can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic… I guess you have a point both ways: it's true this is a way to promote both our eBooks. But we are also sharing valuable information and addressing real questions that people have asked us.

If you didn't find any value in the podcast then I guess only the self-promotion angle would remain, and I can see how that would be annoying.
We are not seeing a shift from desktop to mobile.

We are seeing a shift from mobile plus the backend servers that enable mobile applications.

And Python is the language choice of many for developing backend applications and tools alongside other high performance technologies like Java and Go (no this isn't a plug for GAE).

And Python's dominance as the language of choice for scientific applications (on-top of various C/Fortran libraries of course) is only becoming more and more cemented as time goes on.

And we should probably acknowledge the fairly substantial role Python plays in cross-platform and UNIX GUI development, especially in conjunction with Qt. Probably not a lot of growth in this area, especially as tablet devices take over, but worth a mention.

So Python might not rule (or even be viable) in every facet of software development, but being a central player in mobile backend development (an area that will expand in line with mobile itself), and the lingua franca for scientific programming is none too shabby an achievement.

Hey, it could be worse - right Perl? ;-)
>It definitely has to be acknowledged that from a security perspective, it must be assumed that Chrome contains back doors and "innocently neglected" security vulnerabilities for big brother in all his various incarnations.

What?
Meet the hexaflexagon. It’s about to blow your mind.
I should.
> makes it easier to write servers without worrying about race conditions

So how do you handle concurrency without race conditions without using isolated processes or pure message passing? Ok so you don't have thread locks, big deal, but you still have shared data structured that could be updated in a non-deterministic order depending on which file descriptor gets fired first by epoll (or whatever select thingy is being used lately).
Is there any potential sustainable business in the area Carsabi tried to tackle? I personally feel lots of pain points there but I guess it might be too hard for Carsabi to solve alone? Relatively, it might be easier or more tangible by just joining Facebook and get a quick good exit.
Data, information, insight, intelligence (and wtf is wrong with the QS movement)
Too True. A while ago I started designing and developing my projects by using an incremental "Finish First, Polish Later" technique. And it works SO well.

Whatever I'm working on, do the bare minimum and upload version 1 to the server ASAP. UI is missing color? The about page just has my name and website? Everything isn't perfectly spaced out and aligned? I don't care. It works. Version 1 is done. Upload.

1st) Knowing I can start and finish something that quickly motivates me to get started.

2nd) Seeing the project done and uploaded for the world to see creates a feeling of success, relief, and achievement.

3rd) Knowing that everyone in the world can now see my unpolished site further motivates me to keep working on the project quickly so I don't look bad in front of others.

It's been working out really well for me. That's how I got last week's project http://www.residentevilradio.com done so quickly.
First, check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-monitor#Multi-display_set...

You definitely want a good video card, but you can pick up an nVidia 660 or Radeon 6770 for under $200. You'll need that should you ever do anything, like games, that requires a dedicated graphics card.

I recommend you then attach that to a Matrox TripleHead2Go:
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/th2go/display...

This is what I use to mount my monitors:
http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=multi+monitor+displ...
(originally posted wrong one)

Enjoy! It's awesome!
Are you suggesting that Jabber is a failure? You're aware that it's the underlying protocol for the massively popular Facebook Chat, as well as GTalk, right?
One time is a typo, both times very probably means you didn't know the difference. Not that I care one way or the other since I automatically correct bad grammar as I read, but there are those here that feel it necessary to bring it to everyone's attention.
Nice plots..what software did you use to make the plots?
For reference, here's the keyboard layout of the ADM-3A terminal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Terminal_ADM3A.svg

There's also a nice picture linked in the article in case anyone missed it.
Hey, excuse me if this is covered in the podcast, but I can't watch it right away and so I thought I'd take the opportunity while you're sticking around here to ask the question:

Did either of you follow the route of doing an intro/TOC/first chapter before you did the entire book then start marketing it to test out the response and do some lead gen?

If not, do you have any thoughts on that approach? (including potentially doing pre-sales of the book before you've actually gone ahead and written it?)

I'm working on a couple of eBook concepts right now and these are some concepts I've been thinking about, would be very interested in your point(s) of view.

Congrats on the publishing success!
Samsung Galaxy S3 outsells iPhone 5 in UK, say new figures
Reminds me of this:

http://slashdot.org/story/99/12/25/114201/microsoft-hotmailp...